Socializing capitalism: The CENTURY during the Great Depression

Christian Century, April 12, 2000 by Mark G. Toulouse

WHEN WILL AMERICA BEGIN TO PLAN?

In the presence of the terrible human suffering which now confronts this country the solemn fact persists that, with an adequately planned national economy, such misery could be largely one away.... It is time to cry aloud for an end to the era of laissez faire and the unhindered individualism of profit-seeking production It is time for the reaching of a new evangelism--the evangelism of the voluntary liquidation of the competitive system in order that there may be a planned economy which shall ensure to every person in the nation an adequate supply of the goods of life. It is neither right nor reasonable that people should go hungry, should go without work, should live in terror of old age, in the United States (March 11, 1931).

A MINIMUM CHRISTIAN MORALITY

The church must call its members to a new level of self-discipline, divorced at every possible point from the ostentation, the extravagance and the exploitation of modern life. A new life of Christian asceticism is the need of the hour, not that Christians may be taken out of the world, but that they may be kept unspotted from the contaminations which abound so plentifully within it.... The church must press home upon its sons and daughters the moral shortcoming involved in taking, from a society that contains so many in desiderate need of life's bare necessities, more than is required for normal living.... The church is called upon to show its children how they may begin to find their way out of the moral morass in which our profit-chasing way of life has mired them.... This is a minimum Christian morality for the present need ... (November 25, 1931).

CAN THE CHURCH CAPITALIZE THE DEPRESSION?

Like all institutions--fiscal, commercial, industrial, philanthropic and fiduciary--the churches are in a bad way. Many of them, yielding to the spirit of the boom period, built expensive structures on faith--that is, on borrowed capital.... We cannot wax sentimental about the fate of these church buildings most of which ought never to have been erected, and whose abandonment, now, absolves the denominational home mission treasury of continuing any longer in the sin of subsidizing them.... There is one less church in the community, and that is good, but it is a qualified good. The mathematical reduction of the number of churches in these overchurched communities is not in itself a contribution to Christian unity. It can be such a contribution only if the spiritual fellowship of the expiring church is caught up into a higher conception of Christian fellowship in the neighboring church to which members attach themselves.... Protestant leadership is so involved in the denominational system that it has not perceived the which the depression affords to fling out a great new ideal for organized re] economic desperation of the churches on behalf of such an ideal (November 2, 1932).

Mark G. Toulouse is dean and professor of American religious history at Texas Christian University's Brite Divinity School.